Despite all the kissing and congratulations after the presentation of the prizes at the closing ceremony in Cannes on Sunday night, the relationship between this year's Palme d'Or winner, Lars von Trier, and the best actress winner, Bjork, who stars in his Dancer in the Dark, appears to be as strained as when they were working on the movie.
Bjork appeared in the same room as von Trier at Cannes only when it was absolutely necessary, prompting him to remark after receiving his award: "Though I know she doesn't believe me, if you meet her, tell her I love her very much". All the singer-turned-actress had to say was that she was retiring from movies after her award-winning debut in von Trier's oddball musical.
"I'd seen her in a couple of videos and knew there was a lot to work with, so I asked her to be in the film," von Trier said at Cannes after his film's world premiere. "But I found that she's not an actor. This may be a surprise because, though she seems professional, she isn't acting in the film at all. Bjork was feeling everything that was happening in the story, and reacting to it - which was very hard on her and everyone else."
Von Trier even compared working with Bjork to being around "a dying person all the time," and he added: "It was extremely awkward, because I felt like her executioner, dragging her through all these emotions. While it was very rewarding, it was also extremely painful".
Meanwhile, the man born as Lars Trier has been explaining how he got the aristocratic "von" in his name. "During the 1970s, I read a tremendous amount of Strindberg and also Nietzsche, of course," he said. "When Strindberg went through his crisis in Paris, probably the one known as his inferno crisis, he signed all his letters, `Rex', a royal signature. I thought it was rather amusing. I liked it. The freaked-out and self-glorifying part of it.
"So I added a `von' to my name. It's not exactly unusual in the field of American jazz music either. Some musicians have used aristocratic titles and called themselves, `Duke' and `Count' and so on. Later I naturally had film directors like Sternberg and Stroheim in the back of my mind. In both cases the `von' was their own invention, but it didn't harm their position in Hollywood."
Did you know that during the Cold War a scientist published a paper which suggested that one of the few places in the world that would be safe in the event of a nuclear holocaust would be west Cork? This report apparently was behind the decision of the many bohemian Europeans who moved to live in west Cork.
It is also the inspiration for the $5 million movie, Far From the Mushroom Cloud, which is set to be produced here in September by Grace Carley, who is from Cork city and was an executive with the Irish Film Board in its first incarnation in the 1980s. She and London distributor, Alan McQueen, have set up Mushroom Cloud Productions to make the film as part of a seven-picture schedule - which also includes a low-budget horror movie intriguingly entitled Index Finger in the Sock Drawer.
After completing the magisterial Three Colours trilogy, the Polish writer-director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, had written and was planning to film another trilogy - Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. Now, four years after Kieslowski's untimely death, the first in that trilogy is set to be filmed by Tom Tykwer, the bright young German director of the arthouse hit, Run Lola Run.
Miramax Films announced in Cannes that Cate Blanchett is in talks to star in Heaven, as a Scottish woman who moves to Tuscany and begins a relationship with a young Italian man. Tykwer plans to begin shooting the film in Italy and Germany next month.
It was announced at Cannes that the hot young US actor, Wes Bentley, who made his breakthrough in American Beauty, is set to play the troubled US actor, Montgomery Clift, who received four Oscar nominations - for The Search, A Place in the Sun, Here to Eternity and Judgement at Nuremberg - before he died in 1966 at the age of 45.
Written by Michael Easton, the film is to be directed by Billy Hopkins, who is now looking for actors to play other real-life actors, among them Marlon Brando, John Wayne, and Clift's co-star and close friend, Elizabeth Taylor. Since the release of American Beauty, Wes Bentley has starred in Soul Survivor and in Michael Winterbottom's Gold Rush epic, Kingdom Come. Exhausted from his hectic schedule, Bentley pulled out of Warner's Anne Rice adaptation, Queen of the Damned, on which he is expected to be replaced by Josh Hartnett from The Virgin Suicides.
In his Cannes columns for Moving Pictures, Mike Downey has been listing more things we learn from the movies, among them:
- You can tell if somebody is British because he will be wearing a bow-tie.
- When driving a car, it is normal to look not at the road but at the person sitting beside or behind you for the duration of the journey.
- Taxi drivers don't demand exact or even approximate payment - the first bill you produce from your pocket is always correct.
- All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red read-outs so you know exactly when they're going to go off.
- Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are assigned a partner who is their total opposite.
- A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating, but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.
- It's easy for anyone to land a plane providing there's someone in the control tower to talk you down.
- You can always find a chainsaw when you really need one.
- All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread.
- The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris.
- The more a man and a woman hate each other, the more likely they will fall in love.